ChristiansUnite Forums

US-Russia chill revives Cold War memories
Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:07pm ET15

By Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev won a Nobel Peace Prize for helping thaw relations between Moscow and Washington. Now he is warning that the two countries could slide into a new Cold War.

After over a decade when the relationship between Moscow and Washington was nearly always upbeat, the mood in the two capitals has turned "sour", according to one Western diplomat.

The adversarial attitudes of the Cold War have been resurfacing everywhere from the statements of politicians to the views of people on the streets and the choice of villains in Russian television dramas.

"We have not yet left the past behind: its death grip can be felt everywhere," Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, wrote last month in the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

"Calls to cool down or even toughen the relations between our countries have become everyday fare in Washington.

"In our country we also have people who -- some with alarm and others with relish -- are bracing themselves for a renewal of the Cold War in some sort of new format."

The irony is that on the business front, the mood could not be further removed from the Cold War.

Nearly every month, a new Russian company lists on a New York bourse, U.S. banks are putting up their signs on Moscow's streets and investors are clambering over each other to get their hands on Russian stocks.

SUMMONED

The atmosphere is very different from the one five years ago when President Bush first met Russia's President Vladimir Putin. They seemed to hit it off and their rapport set the tone for strong ties.

"There is a sour mood that you will see in Washington about the relationship and you know that you will find the same view (in Moscow)," said the Western diplomat.

That mood could make for an awkward few days in July when Putin hosts Bush and other world leaders for a summit of the Group of Eight industrialized countries in St. Petersburg.

On April 18, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William Burns was called to the Russian foreign ministry. Moscow was upset because, it said, a Washington think-tank had given Chechen separatists a platform to voice their violent philosophy.

U.S. ambassadors in Moscow rarely get that treatment, and the incident illustrated the new tension.

There is no shortage of irritants between Moscow and Washington. They range from stalled talks on Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization to differences about how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions and Washington's tough line on Moscow ally Belarus.

STRONGER RUSSIA

Analysts say that behind all these issues there is a unifying theme: Russia, buoyed by record prices for the oil it exports, is no longer prepared to play the junior partner.

"You get the impression Russia is getting stronger before your eyes and that it ... can pay a lot less heed to the reaction of Western partners than it did before," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

The attitude is: "It is not us that need the rest of the world, it is them that need us," Lukyanov said.

"Bush and (U.S. Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice ... are ready to ignore quite a lot but there are more and more things that they believe are unfriendly and they cannot ignore."

Asked on a visit to Moscow last week if Russia was chafing at U.S. policy, the State Department's No. 3 official Nicholas Burns, said: "I did not hear anything like that from the last two days from any Russian officials."

But late last year, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged the United States to take steps to arrest what he said was its declining relationship with Moscow.

ENEMY

More and more Russians see the United States as a rival.

Russian screenwriters have tended to cast terrorists and gangsters as the villains in a nod to the end of the Cold War.

But an episode this month of television action drama "Sea Devils" showed the heroes, a Russian special forces unit, rushing to stop the U.S. Navy stealing a strategic missile.

In a survey conducted in December by pollster VTsIOM, 30 percent of those questioned named the United States as the main threat to Russia's national security. China was second on 17 percent.

"I think the United States -- the state, not the people -- is some sort of bandit group," said Artur Saradzhyan, a businessman and former government official who lives near Moscow.

"It wants to establish its power over everybody and turn every state, including Russia, into its vassal and a source of energy," he said.

US-Russia chill revives Cold War memories (http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-05-01T032740Z_01_L18642992_RTRUKOC_0_US-RUSSIA-USA-MOOD.xml)